By: Kayhan Int’l Staff Writer
 
During his "historic” visit to Hiroshima, Japan, on Friday, May 28, President Barack Obama refused to apologize for the United States launching a nuclear attack on the city in 1945. Instead, the "President of Change” called for a world without nuclear weapons, which was silly at best.
In fact, Obama has been talking up his pro-disarmament stance for years, even as he pushed the U.S. to invest one trillion dollars in modernizing and expanding its massive nuclear arsenal. To make matters worse, new figures from the Pentagon show that the reduction of the U.S. nuclear arsenal has slowed dramatically under Obama.
Now, U.S. officials are trying to defend the lack of progress during Obama’s time in office, blaming hostility with Russia. At the same time, Obama has continued to publicly present the disarmament program as ongoing, which the new figures show it clearly was not.
Whatever it is, the new policy only helps create the impression that America, which according to a report by the Brookings, has "reportedly” built some 70,000 nuclear missiles, warheads and bombs plus 4,680 nuclear bombers (1951-present), is in fact preparing for nuclear war, and might even strike first.
It further gives the impression that the U.S., which keeps talking about the non-existent dangers of nuclear Iran, isn’t leading by example on the non-proliferation front. The country, according to Chuck Hansen (U.S. Nuclear Weapons: The Secret History, Orion Books), has so far carried out 106 nuclear tests in the Pacific, 911 nuclear tests in Nevada, and 10 nuclear weapons tests in Alaska, Colorado, Mississippi and New Mexico.
Under Obama’s new security doctrine, the U.S. is also increasing spending across the board on its nuclear arsenal, including the refurbishment of various nuclear weapons programs, warheads, atomic demolition munitions, and atomic artillery shells run by the National Nuclear Security Administration. The idea is to prepare the homeland in the event of a nuclear first strike and to survive - a myth that drove the U.S. and the former Soviet Union each to build tens of thousands of nuclear weapons during the Cold War.
This dangerous policy is mistaken on three counts. As per the new security doctrine, the U.S. is modernizing its nuclear forces; its nuclear triad is markedly superior to the Chinese and Russian arsenals; and the real danger is not the U.S. falling behind the modernization of other countries but in racing aggressively ahead.
It’s a vain search for useless supremacy at the cost of destabilizing the world. The U.S. has not taken an acquisition holiday in its nuclear arsenal and the real danger in its nuclear modernization may not be too little, but too much. While many of Russia’s ageing systems are reaching the ends of their service lives, many of the systems that make up the U.S. arsenal will not retire until 2030.
As long as the U.S. and the seven other countries with nuclear weapons - China, Russia, France, UK, India, Pakistan and Israel - make no definitive moves to eliminate their nuclear arsenals, and/or the danger of nuclear war fighting and a "first strike” nuclear option remains an indispensable instrument,” there is simply no realistic prospect of a nuclear-free world. Obama made that clear during his speech in Hiroshima.